Blame Yourself for Everything.
As a Canadian, I grew up with privilege. As a white, male with supportive parents in a well-off neighbourhood, I grew up with a lot of privilege.
Knowing this, my parents wanted to take me to a part of the world where this privilege did not exist. Naturally, this parenting strategy brought me to the middle of the bush in rural Kenya at the age of 9 and then again at 12. I have written about this before. In summary, the reason for the trip was to ensure that I knew how lucky I was to be born into the circumstances that I had no power in selecting.
The trip worked. I saw all kinds of poverty rooted in unlucky birthplaces, rather than choices. Even at a young age, I was able to see great similarities in the hopes and dreams between myself and my new Kenyan friends but great differences in our abilities to achieve them. For a variety of reasons beyond my control, I simply started in a more fruitful place than that of those I met halfway across the world.
I saw kids my own age with no shoes on walking 5 kilometres to get brown water from the river each day. And then trying to learn at school on an empty stomach, if they had access or time for school at all. I met young girls who had been married before their teenage years only to fulfill the domestic wishes of their husbands. I heard stories of pregnant women being pushed in wheelbarrows to a hospital made of cow dung and sticks. I saw the burden of communicable and parasitic diseases rage through communities for which the life-saving drug was inaccessible at less than $10. Most of all, I saw nascent dreams toppled by no way to act on them.
I saw immense challenges to which I could not relate.
Many people who travel to parts unknown, as I have been fortunate to do, deal with some kind of culture shock on their first trip. It is a great surprise to experience an inconceivable way of life based on choices that provincially-minded Westerners would never have to consider. For folks who have spent lots of time in poor areas, culture shock serves more as a recalibration or a reminder of the challenges that certain people face.
On their return home, many of these same people experience a reverse culture shock somewhere in between an amazement that life has not changed back home and an acknowledgment of the ease of life in the Western world.
At the Intersection of Accountability & Frustration
My first experience with reverse culture shock took the affective form of disappointment, after my second trip to Kenya:
On a cold, snowy Saturday morning in January I sat on my parents’ couch watching a Manchester United game, in the comfort of a heated home. At the half, my mom asked me to go get the mail. Reluctantly, I obliged.
The house that I grew up in had its mailbox at the end of the street, some 200m away from our 50m-long driveway. This meant that I not only had to gear up with the essentially Canadian winter suit, fit with snow pants and all, but that I also had to walk a half of a kilometre to get something that most likely would not make my life better in the slightest. Ugh.
I trudged through the snow and opened up the mailbox. In between credit card bills and flyers, I saw the street’s monthly newsletter. If you have ever lived in a semi-rural town on the outskirts of the city, you may be familiar with the neighbourhood paper. It’s the one that talks about the challenges in your community, the parades that took place, the leaves that are changing, and the local youth sports events that drew the mayor to town. Pretty boring stuff.
As I walked back home, I started flipping through the latest edition. On the front page, the local writers proclaimed:
“Our street is the last one in the whole city to be snow plowed!”.
Of course, this is not true. But the outrage of my neighbours at a few extra days of driving their luxury cars through puffy, thick snow was so strong that they felt a need to complain about it. Better still, they felt they had to blame the municipal government for not doing it for them.
This is where the frustration set in. Coming from a place where people experience problems like hunger and don’t have rooves over their heads, it was hard for me to comprehend why snow removal was our greatest complaint back home. I, too, had been complaining about the interruption to my day of walking through the snow to pick up the mail. But reading this proclamation of disgust from my neighbours put both mine and their disapproval into perspective.
I wanted to blame my neighbours for what they perceived to be a big problem. I wanted to blame them for not being informed enough to care about something bigger than themselves. And for years later, I did. I blamed other people for not being as passionate about the issues that I cared about, as if my interests were somehow more noble or important than those of someone else.
Today, I employ a very different strategy. I blame myself.
In the case of the snow removal, a better approach would have been to take accountability for not better exposing my neighbours to the importance or urgency of caring about my own passion project.
Who am I to say that snow removal is not a problem? Who am I to blame someone for caring about something that I don’t care about? But if I really believe in something and want someone to invest their valuable time into believing in it too, I have to take responsibility for showing them why. I have to take the blame.
I remember having a similar experience, years later, down the Napo River in the Amazon. There are all kinds of multinational companies operating there, building telecommunications and non-renewable energy projects. Deforestation is a big part of the work to get ready for projects like these.
Speaking with a local Ecuadorian environmental activist, Sebastian, I remember telling him how upset and angry I was at the companies who came to land that was occupied by Indigenous people since time began to start ripping it up for profit. I rhymed off reasons why I thought this behaviour was wrong.
Sebastian told me that he disagreed with my emotional response. He told me that he did not blame the multinationals for their interests and their behaviour.
“Their interests are just different than mine”, I remember him saying.
He did not blame those who disagreed with his values, rather worked as an activist to try to change their mind. Everyone is entitled to their own interests and behaviours, but I am also entitled to change their mind.
Sebastian’s life work was taking the blame for letting multinationals rip up his native land. And inspired by that blame was a lifetime of successful activism and change. Imagine if he had sat idly by wagging his finger at deforesters. No good would have come of that.
The Problem with Passing the Buck
As I have written about in the past, I believe that luck is the one thing that decides who gets to pursue purpose and who gets to pursue survival. In my experience, this luck consists of enough health, safety and access to opportunity to participate in the meritocracy of your choosing. When you have choices, you can pursue purpose.
I would like to venture to take this a step further with the following statement:
Outside of 1) how lucky you were at birth, 2) the exogenous health and safety misfortunes that you encounter through life, and 3) the laws of physics, everything is within your control.
Outside of these items, I believe that all blame can reasonably be shifted away from another person or event and on to yourself. Everything is within your control, just not when your goal comes to fruition or what pivots will be necessary along the way.
The way that we can ensure that our goals come to fruition, by assuming blame, is by buying their assurance. We can buy outcomes with scarce resources like time, experience, money and persistence. Except for money and the limitations on other scarce resources that a lack of money creates, we all have similar amounts of these resources at our disposal.
Most of us will use these resources, namely time, to blame other people or things for bad outcomes. On the flip side, we like to take the blame, in the form of credit, for good outcomes we had nothing to do with. The first is obviously fallacious and the second is too without meaningful participation.
Once we decide what is important to us, we can invest accordingly and with great control over the outcome.
There have been times in my life where I have worked really hard to achieve a goal. And there have been other times where I have quit or lost interest. I take the credit, or blame, for my behaviour in both instances.
When I noticed that there was no place for my friends to go to high school in the rural community of Kenya that I visited, I decided to accept the blame and build a school for some of them. When I became aware of the deforestation in the Amazon, I decided not to accept the blame on that issue.
Since time is scarce, so too is where we decide to accept blame and act. But the option is always there for those of us who can pursue purpose.
If you assume radical responsibility for everything in your life, you will achieve what you want. Accept the things in your life that are truly exogenous like the luck of where you started and the health and safety outcomes that are given to you along the way.
Everything else is within your control.
Radical Responsibility is Empowering
There are some situations in life where we do accept the blame, or at least the responsibility. For people trying to find a job, it is necessary to assume the blame for being hired or not. A job is necessary and therefore motivating enough to take responsibility. For many, kids are also very important. Trying to have a child requires a lot to line up. In order to put these ducks in a row, partners (particularly the pending mother) has a lot of blame to assume.
What if we applied that same level of vigorous persistence to everything?
If you don’t believe me (I hope you are skeptical), try it out. Take control of something mundane to start. Change something. Exercise your free will.
If someone spills their drink on you, take the blame for your frustration. Don’t be frustrated, event a new cup, apologize for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Change something. Take responsibility.
If you are fighting with your partner and you don’t want to fight with your partner, take the blame for fighting. Listen, calm down, don’t fight.
If you want the snow plowed on your street, take the blame. Call the municipality or gather your neighbours to do it yourself.
You may be thinking that my examples neglect baggage, exist in a vacuum or require too much work. That’s probably because you don’t care enough about changing these particular scenarios, or because they do not apply to you. And that is completely fine. Your time is scarce. However:
If you care enough to change a situation, you can. Otherwise, accept your own apathy and indifference on the issue.
Later you can start to assume the blame for big events that you were not responsible for starting but that you can be responsible for changing.
You don’t need to complain about an exogenous event. If it’s existence frustrates you enough, you can change it.
Accepting blame is empowering, addictive and will help you achieve the things you really want. Give it a try.
